City lights
The urbane allure of Stereolab
by Stephanie Zacharek
It's something you're born with, like the color of your eyes: if you're meant
to live in a city, it's marked on your soul, and that's the knowledge Britain's
Stereolab use as a starting point. Stereolab's latest, Dots and Loops
(Elektra), seems to speak of the intimacy of cities: living so close together
can make you less social or more, depending on your mood, the circumstances,
the phases of the moon -- but the option (or at least the hope) of connecting
is always there. "I'll try again/The right one will come along/I need someone
intoxicating and strong," lead singer Laetitia Stadler sings on "Rainbo
Conversation." Her phrasing is lanky and sensuous, suggesting nothing so much
as the way a woman smoothes on a pair of stockings when she's getting ready to
go out. In the line, you hear the resignation and reticence of a woman who's
been alone for a while, but there's plenty of untapped energy lurking there
too. She's decided to go out dancing one more time because, after all, who
knows?
Dots and Loops isn't a huge departure from last year's Emperor
Tomato Ketchup, but the band's continuing experimentation with sonic
textures is a long way from getting tired: even though Stereolab generally use
'60s pop as their major jumping-off point, they sound as if they hadn't begun
to exhaust its possibilities. The songs on Dots and Loops make up a
patchwork of shapes and colors, like the vivid mishmash of roofs in a Chagall
painting. A number might open with electronic crackles and ease its way forward
on a wave of Latin guitar. A single song might incorporate big, soaring swoops,
like a condor flying low, and a snaky reggae beat. Sketches of
Spain-style horns swerve, eel-like, between the persnickety, perfectly
parallel bars of electronic drumbeats.
There's both warmth and coolness in the band's sound, but it's never sterile.
Using a combination of vintage synthesizers, Farfisa and Vox organs, and plain
old electric guitar and percussion, Stereolab blend brushstrokes of rich,
saturated tones with incredible airiness -- it's a sound that lets lots of
light in. Most of the arrangements are beautifully worked out, intricate yet
stripped free of clutter. "Diagonals" is built around a stuttering, marchlike
beat; smooth layers of horns stretch out on top of it like a lazy cat on top of
a TV set. And "Prisoner of Mars" is anchored by a slow-moving, deceptively
simple drum rhythm, but you can hear how each beat comes from a different part
of the drum head. The subtle change in texture gives the song a shape that
breathes, opening it out like a billowing curtain.
Stadler's languid, dewy vocals work beautifully with the band's shivery,
elastic sheets of sound. She's slinky and urbane (she often sings in French),
but her voice betrays a touch of innocence, too. For me, certain Stereolab
songs (particularly "Cybele's Reverie," from Emperor Tomato Ketchup)
evoke Jacques Demy's 1964 movie The Umbrellas of Cherbourg -- the rich,
ever-shifting hues of the band's sound remind me of the candy-box colors of
that movie, and Stadler's voice captures the vaguely wistful quality of its
star, the young Catherine Deneuve. Stadler loves to sing just slightly behind
the beat, but she never drags a song down -- if anything, she just enhances its
graceful arches and willowy curves.
Sometimes Stadler sounds blas, almost bored, and yet she never sounds
boring. Maybe that's because the secret she knows, and shares with us, is that
passion and longing often disguise themselves as restlessness. That's what long
nights in the city are all about: the cab that takes you from the disco to the
all-night diner for a bite to eat may whisk you through Petula Clark's
glittering "Downtown" only to deposit you in an Edward Hopper painting. Even
then, the guy who slides your piece of pie across the counter could still be
the man of your dreams.